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<!doctype html>
<html>
<head>
<title>Birdseye - jQuery plugin</title>
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0, maximum-scale=1.0, user-scalable=no" />
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="birdseye.css" />
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.7.1/jquery.min.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jqueryui/1.8.16/jquery-ui.min.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="dataset.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="birdseye.js"></script>
<style type="text/css">
::-webkit-scrollbar {
display: none
}
body {
font-family: Helvetica, Arial, Sans-serif;
font-size: 100%;
font-weight: normal;
margin: 0 1em;
}
h1, h2, h3, h4 {
margin-top:0;
}
p, blockquote {
line-height: 1.4em;
}
.content {
margin-top: 2em;
}
header {
background: #eee;
background: #fff;
border-top: 4px solid #ff0000;
float: right;
margin: 0 0 3em 0;
overflow: auto;
padding: 1.5em 1em 1em 1em;
width: 70%;
}
.chapters {
overflow: auto;
clear: both;
}
.chapters div {
background: #eee;
float: right;
margin: 0 0 3em 0;
overflow: auto;
padding: 1.5em 1em 1em 1em;
width: 70%;
}
</style>
<script type="text/javascript">
$(function() {
$('.chapters').birdseye();
});
</script>
</head>
<body>
<section class="content">
<header>
<h2>Hello</h2>
<p>I'm Edwin, thanks for checking out jQuery.birdseye :)</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://github.com/ehmorris/jQuery.birdseye">View the github repo</a></li>
<li><a href="http://twitter.com/ehmorris">Follow me on twitter</a></li>
<li><a href="http://ehmorris.com">Visit my website</a></li>
</ul>
<p>The example text used is from A Tale of Two Cities, via <a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/98">Project Gutenberg</a></p>
<p>Enjoy</p>
</header>
<aside class="birdseye"></aside>
<section class="chapters">
<div>
<h2>1. The Period</h2>
<blockquote>
It was the best of times,<br>it was the worst of times,<br> it was the age of
wisdom,<br> it was the age of foolishness,<br> it was the epoch of belief,<br> it
was the epoch of incredulity,<br> it was the season of Light,<br> it was the
season of Darkness,<br> it was the spring of hope,<br> it was the winter of
despair,
</blockquote>
<p>
we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were
all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way—
in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its
noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for
evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.
</p>
<p>
There were a king with a large jaw and a queen with a plain face, on the
throne of England; there were a king with a large jaw and a queen with
a fair face, on the throne of France. In both countries it was clearer
than crystal to the lords of the State preserves of loaves and fishes,
that things in general were settled for ever.
</p>
<p>
It was the year of Our Lord one thousand seven hundred and seventy-five.
Spiritual revelations were conceded to England at that favoured period,
as at this. Mrs. Southcott had recently attained her five-and-twentieth
blessed birthday, of whom a prophetic private in the Life Guards had
heralded the sublime appearance by announcing that arrangements were
made for the swallowing up of London and Westminster. Even the Cock-lane
ghost had been laid only a round dozen of years, after rapping out its
messages, as the spirits of this very year last past (supernaturally
deficient in originality) rapped out theirs. Mere messages in the
earthly order of events had lately come to the English Crown and People,
from a congress of British subjects in America: which, strange
to relate, have proved more important to the human race than any
communications yet received through any of the chickens of the Cock-lane
brood.
</p>
<p>
France, less favoured on the whole as to matters spiritual than her
sister of the shield and trident, rolled with exceeding smoothness down
hill, making paper money and spending it. Under the guidance of her
Christian pastors, she entertained herself, besides, with such humane
achievements as sentencing a youth to have his hands cut off, his tongue
torn out with pincers, and his body burned alive, because he had not
kneeled down in the rain to do honour to a dirty procession of monks
which passed within his view, at a distance of some fifty or sixty
yards. It is likely enough that, rooted in the woods of France and
Norway, there were growing trees, when that sufferer was put to death,
already marked by the Woodman, Fate, to come down and be sawn into
boards, to make a certain movable framework with a sack and a knife in
it, terrible in history. It is likely enough that in the rough outhouses
of some tillers of the heavy lands adjacent to Paris, there were
sheltered from the weather that very day, rude carts, bespattered with
rustic mire, snuffed about by pigs, and roosted in by poultry, which
the Farmer, Death, had already set apart to be his tumbrils of
the Revolution. But that Woodman and that Farmer, though they work
unceasingly, work silently, and no one heard them as they went about
with muffled tread: the rather, forasmuch as to entertain any suspicion
that they were awake, was to be atheistical and traitorous.
</p>
<p>
In England, there was scarcely an amount of order and protection to
justify much national boasting. Daring burglaries by armed men, and
highway robberies, took place in the capital itself every night;
families were publicly cautioned not to go out of town without removing
their furniture to upholsterers' warehouses for security; the highwayman
in the dark was a City tradesman in the light, and, being recognised and
challenged by his fellow-tradesman whom he stopped in his character of
"the Captain," gallantly shot him through the head and rode away; the
mail was waylaid by seven robbers, and the guard shot three dead, and
then got shot dead himself by the other four, "in consequence of the
failure of his ammunition:" after which the mail was robbed in peace;
that magnificent potentate, the Lord Mayor of London, was made to stand
and deliver on Turnham Green, by one highwayman, who despoiled the
illustrious creature in sight of all his retinue; prisoners in London
gaols fought battles with their turnkeys, and the majesty of the law
fired blunderbusses in among them, loaded with rounds of shot and ball;
thieves snipped off diamond crosses from the necks of noble lords at
Court drawing-rooms; musketeers went into St. Giles's, to search
for contraband goods, and the mob fired on the musketeers, and the
musketeers fired on the mob, and nobody thought any of these occurrences
much out of the common way. In the midst of them, the hangman, ever busy
and ever worse than useless, was in constant requisition; now, stringing
up long rows of miscellaneous criminals; now, hanging a housebreaker on
Saturday who had been taken on Tuesday; now, burning people in the
hand at Newgate by the dozen, and now burning pamphlets at the door of
Westminster Hall; to-day, taking the life of an atrocious murderer,
and to-morrow of a wretched pilferer who had robbed a farmer's boy of
sixpence.
</p>
<p>
All these things, and a thousand like them, came to pass in and close
upon the dear old year one thousand seven hundred and seventy-five.
Environed by them, while the Woodman and the Farmer worked unheeded,
those two of the large jaws, and those other two of the plain and the
fair faces, trod with stir enough, and carried their divine rights
with a high hand. Thus did the year one thousand seven hundred
and seventy-five conduct their Greatnesses, and myriads of small
creatures—the creatures of this chronicle among the rest—along the
roads that lay before them.
</p>
</div>
<div>
<h2>2. The Mail</h2>
<p>
It was the Dover road that lay, on a Friday night late in November,
before the first of the persons with whom this history has business.
The Dover road lay, as to him, beyond the Dover mail, as it lumbered up
Shooter's Hill. He walked up hill in the mire by the side of the mail,
as the rest of the passengers did; not because they had the least relish
for walking exercise, under the circumstances, but because the hill,
and the harness, and the mud, and the mail, were all so heavy, that the
horses had three times already come to a stop, besides once drawing the
coach across the road, with the mutinous intent of taking it back
to Blackheath. Reins and whip and coachman and guard, however, in
combination, had read that article of war which forbade a purpose
otherwise strongly in favour of the argument, that some brute animals
are endued with Reason; and the team had capitulated and returned to
their duty.
</p>
<p>
With drooping heads and tremulous tails, they mashed their way through
the thick mud, floundering and stumbling between whiles, as if they were
falling to pieces at the larger joints. As often as the driver rested
them and brought them to a stand, with a wary "Wo-ho! so-ho-then!" the
near leader violently shook his head and everything upon it—like an
unusually emphatic horse, denying that the coach could be got up the
hill. Whenever the leader made this rattle, the passenger started, as a
nervous passenger might, and was disturbed in mind.
</p>
<p>
There was a steaming mist in all the hollows, and it had roamed in its
forlornness up the hill, like an evil spirit, seeking rest and finding
none. A clammy and intensely cold mist, it made its slow way through the
air in ripples that visibly followed and overspread one another, as the
waves of an unwholesome sea might do. It was dense enough to shut out
everything from the light of the coach-lamps but these its own workings,
and a few yards of road; and the reek of the labouring horses steamed
into it, as if they had made it all.
</p>
<p>
Two other passengers, besides the one, were plodding up the hill by the
side of the mail. All three were wrapped to the cheekbones and over the
ears, and wore jack-boots. Not one of the three could have said, from
anything he saw, what either of the other two was like; and each was
hidden under almost as many wrappers from the eyes of the mind, as from
the eyes of the body, of his two companions. In those days, travellers
were very shy of being confidential on a short notice, for anybody on
the road might be a robber or in league with robbers. As to the latter,
when every posting-house and ale-house could produce somebody in
"the Captain's" pay, ranging from the landlord to the lowest stable
non-descript, it was the likeliest thing upon the cards. So the guard
of the Dover mail thought to himself, that Friday night in November, one
thousand seven hundred and seventy-five, lumbering up Shooter's Hill, as
he stood on his own particular perch behind the mail, beating his feet,
and keeping an eye and a hand on the arm-chest before him, where a
loaded blunderbuss lay at the top of six or eight loaded horse-pistols,
deposited on a substratum of cutlass.
</p>
<p>
The Dover mail was in its usual genial position that the guard suspected
the passengers, the passengers suspected one another and the guard, they
all suspected everybody else, and the coachman was sure of nothing but
the horses; as to which cattle he could with a clear conscience have
taken his oath on the two Testaments that they were not fit for the
journey.
</p>
<p>
"Wo-ho!" said the coachman. "So, then! One more pull and you're at the
top and be damned to you, for I have had trouble enough to get you to
it!—Joe!"
</p>
<p>
"Halloa!" the guard replied.
</p>
<p>
"What o'clock do you make it, Joe?"
</p>
<p>
"Ten minutes, good, past eleven."
</p>
<p>
"My blood!" ejaculated the vexed coachman, "and not atop of Shooter's
yet! Tst! Yah! Get on with you!"
</p>
<p>
The emphatic horse, cut short by the whip in a most decided negative,
made a decided scramble for it, and the three other horses followed
suit. Once more, the Dover mail struggled on, with the jack-boots of its
passengers squashing along by its side. They had stopped when the coach
stopped, and they kept close company with it. If any one of the three
had had the hardihood to propose to another to walk on a little ahead
into the mist and darkness, he would have put himself in a fair way of
getting shot instantly as a highwayman.
</p>
<p>
The last burst carried the mail to the summit of the hill. The horses
stopped to breathe again, and the guard got down to skid the wheel for
the descent, and open the coach-door to let the passengers in.
</p>
<p>
"Tst! Joe!" cried the coachman in a warning voice, looking down from his
box.
</p>
<p>
"What do you say, Tom?"
</p>
<p>
They both listened.
</p>
<p>
"I say a horse at a canter coming up, Joe."
</p>
<p>
"<i>I</i> say a horse at a gallop, Tom," returned the guard, leaving his hold
of the door, and mounting nimbly to his place. "Gentlemen! In the king's
name, all of you!"
</p>
<p>
With this hurried adjuration, he cocked his blunderbuss, and stood on
the offensive.
</p>
<p>
The passenger booked by this history, was on the coach-step, getting in;
the two other passengers were close behind him, and about to follow. He
remained on the step, half in the coach and half out of; they remained
in the road below him. They all looked from the coachman to the guard,
and from the guard to the coachman, and listened. The coachman looked
back and the guard looked back, and even the emphatic leader pricked up
his ears and looked back, without contradicting.
</p>
<p>
The stillness consequent on the cessation of the rumbling and labouring
of the coach, added to the stillness of the night, made it very quiet
indeed. The panting of the horses communicated a tremulous motion to
the coach, as if it were in a state of agitation. The hearts of the
passengers beat loud enough perhaps to be heard; but at any rate, the
quiet pause was audibly expressive of people out of breath, and holding
the breath, and having the pulses quickened by expectation.
</p>
<p>
The sound of a horse at a gallop came fast and furiously up the hill.
</p>
<p>
"So-ho!" the guard sang out, as loud as he could roar. "Yo there! Stand!
I shall fire!"
</p>
<p>
The pace was suddenly checked, and, with much splashing and floundering,
a man's voice called from the mist, "Is that the Dover mail?"
</p>
<p>
"Never you mind what it is!" the guard retorted. "What are you?"
</p>
<p>
"<i>Is</i> that the Dover mail?"
</p>
<p>
"Why do you want to know?"
</p>
<p>
"I want a passenger, if it is."
</p>
<p>
"What passenger?"
</p>
<p>
"Mr. Jarvis Lorry."
</p>
<p>
Our booked passenger showed in a moment that it was his name. The guard,
the coachman, and the two other passengers eyed him distrustfully.
</p>
<p>
"Keep where you are," the guard called to the voice in the mist,
"because, if I should make a mistake, it could never be set right in
your lifetime. Gentleman of the name of Lorry answer straight."
</p>
<p>
"What is the matter?" asked the passenger, then, with mildly quavering
speech. "Who wants me? Is it Jerry?"
</p>
<p>
("I don't like Jerry's voice, if it is Jerry," growled the guard to
himself. "He's hoarser than suits me, is Jerry.")
</p>
<p>
"Yes, Mr. Lorry."
</p>
<p>
"What is the matter?"
</p>
<p>
"A despatch sent after you from over yonder. T. and Co."
</p>
<p>
"I know this messenger, guard," said Mr. Lorry, getting down into the
road—assisted from behind more swiftly than politely by the other two
passengers, who immediately scrambled into the coach, shut the door, and
pulled up the window. "He may come close; there's nothing wrong."
</p>
<p>
"I hope there ain't, but I can't make so 'Nation sure of that," said the
guard, in gruff soliloquy. "Hallo you!"
</p>
<p>
"Well! And hallo you!" said Jerry, more hoarsely than before.
</p>
<p>
"Come on at a footpace! d'ye mind me? And if you've got holsters to that
saddle o' yourn, don't let me see your hand go nigh 'em. For I'm a devil
at a quick mistake, and when I make one it takes the form of Lead. So
now let's look at you."
</p>
<p>
The figures of a horse and rider came slowly through the eddying mist,
and came to the side of the mail, where the passenger stood. The rider
stooped, and, casting up his eyes at the guard, handed the passenger
a small folded paper. The rider's horse was blown, and both horse and
rider were covered with mud, from the hoofs of the horse to the hat of
the man.
</p>
<p>
"Guard!" said the passenger, in a tone of quiet business confidence.
</p>
<p>
The watchful guard, with his right hand at the stock of his raised
blunderbuss, his left at the barrel, and his eye on the horseman,
answered curtly, "Sir."
</p>
<p>
"There is nothing to apprehend. I belong to Tellson's Bank. You must
know Tellson's Bank in London. I am going to Paris on business. A crown
to drink. I may read this?"
</p>
<p>
"If so be as you're quick, sir."
</p>
<p>
He opened it in the light of the coach-lamp on that side, and
read—first to himself and then aloud: "'Wait at Dover for Mam'selle.'
It's not long, you see, guard. Jerry, say that my answer was, RECALLED
TO LIFE."
</p>
<p>
Jerry started in his saddle. "That's a Blazing strange answer, too,"
said he, at his hoarsest.
</p>
<p>
"Take that message back, and they will know that I received this, as
well as if I wrote. Make the best of your way. Good night."
</p>
<p>
With those words the passenger opened the coach-door and got in; not at
all assisted by his fellow-passengers, who had expeditiously secreted
their watches and purses in their boots, and were now making a general
pretence of being asleep. With no more definite purpose than to escape
the hazard of originating any other kind of action.
</p>
<p>
The coach lumbered on again, with heavier wreaths of mist closing round
it as it began the descent. The guard soon replaced his blunderbuss
in his arm-chest, and, having looked to the rest of its contents, and
having looked to the supplementary pistols that he wore in his belt,
looked to a smaller chest beneath his seat, in which there were a
few smith's tools, a couple of torches, and a tinder-box. For he was
furnished with that completeness that if the coach-lamps had been blown
and stormed out, which did occasionally happen, he had only to shut
himself up inside, keep the flint and steel sparks well off the straw,
and get a light with tolerable safety and ease (if he were lucky) in
five minutes.
</p>
<p>
"Tom!" softly over the coach roof.
</p>
<p>
"Hallo, Joe."
</p>
<p>
"Did you hear the message?"
</p>
<p>
"I did, Joe."
</p>
<p>
"What did you make of it, Tom?"
</p>
<p>
"Nothing at all, Joe."
</p>
<p>
"That's a coincidence, too," the guard mused, "for I made the same of it
myself."
</p>
<p>
Jerry, left alone in the mist and darkness, dismounted meanwhile, not
only to ease his spent horse, but to wipe the mud from his face, and
shake the wet out of his hat-brim, which might be capable of
holding about half a gallon. After standing with the bridle over his
heavily-splashed arm, until the wheels of the mail were no longer within
hearing and the night was quite still again, he turned to walk down the
hill.
</p>
<p>
"After that there gallop from Temple Bar, old lady, I won't trust your
fore-legs till I get you on the level," said this hoarse messenger,
glancing at his mare. "'Recalled to life.' That's a Blazing strange
message. Much of that wouldn't do for you, Jerry! I say, Jerry! You'd
be in a Blazing bad way, if recalling to life was to come into fashion,
Jerry!"
</p>
</div>
<div>
<h2>3. The Night Shadows</h2>
<p>
A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is
constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other. A
solemn consideration, when I enter a great city by night, that every
one of those darkly clustered houses encloses its own secret; that every
room in every one of them encloses its own secret; that every beating
heart in the hundreds of thousands of breasts there, is, in some of
its imaginings, a secret to the heart nearest it! Something of the
awfulness, even of Death itself, is referable to this. No more can I
turn the leaves of this dear book that I loved, and vainly hope in time
to read it all. No more can I look into the depths of this unfathomable
water, wherein, as momentary lights glanced into it, I have had glimpses
of buried treasure and other things submerged. It was appointed that the
book should shut with a spring, for ever and for ever, when I had read
but a page. It was appointed that the water should be locked in an
eternal frost, when the light was playing on its surface, and I stood
in ignorance on the shore. My friend is dead, my neighbour is dead,
my love, the darling of my soul, is dead; it is the inexorable
consolidation and perpetuation of the secret that was always in that
individuality, and which I shall carry in mine to my life's end. In
any of the burial-places of this city through which I pass, is there
a sleeper more inscrutable than its busy inhabitants are, in their
innermost personality, to me, or than I am to them?
</p>
<p>
As to this, his natural and not to be alienated inheritance, the
messenger on horseback had exactly the same possessions as the King, the
first Minister of State, or the richest merchant in London. So with the
three passengers shut up in the narrow compass of one lumbering old mail
coach; they were mysteries to one another, as complete as if each had
been in his own coach and six, or his own coach and sixty, with the
breadth of a county between him and the next.
</p>
<p>
The messenger rode back at an easy trot, stopping pretty often at
ale-houses by the way to drink, but evincing a tendency to keep his
own counsel, and to keep his hat cocked over his eyes. He had eyes that
assorted very well with that decoration, being of a surface black, with
no depth in the colour or form, and much too near together—as if they
were afraid of being found out in something, singly, if they kept too
far apart. They had a sinister expression, under an old cocked-hat like
a three-cornered spittoon, and over a great muffler for the chin and
throat, which descended nearly to the wearer's knees. When he stopped
for drink, he moved this muffler with his left hand, only while he
poured his liquor in with his right; as soon as that was done, he
muffled again.
</p>
<p>
"No, Jerry, no!" said the messenger, harping on one theme as he rode.
"It wouldn't do for you, Jerry. Jerry, you honest tradesman, it wouldn't
suit <i>your</i> line of business! Recalled—! Bust me if I don't think he'd
been a drinking!"
</p>
<p>
His message perplexed his mind to that degree that he was fain, several
times, to take off his hat to scratch his head. Except on the crown,
which was raggedly bald, he had stiff, black hair, standing jaggedly all
over it, and growing down hill almost to his broad, blunt nose. It was
so like Smith's work, so much more like the top of a strongly spiked
wall than a head of hair, that the best of players at leap-frog might
have declined him, as the most dangerous man in the world to go over.
</p>
<p>
While he trotted back with the message he was to deliver to the night
watchman in his box at the door of Tellson's Bank, by Temple Bar, who
was to deliver it to greater authorities within, the shadows of the
night took such shapes to him as arose out of the message, and took such
shapes to the mare as arose out of <i>her</i> private topics of uneasiness.
They seemed to be numerous, for she shied at every shadow on the road.
</p>
<p>
What time, the mail-coach lumbered, jolted, rattled, and bumped upon
its tedious way, with its three fellow-inscrutables inside. To whom,
likewise, the shadows of the night revealed themselves, in the forms
their dozing eyes and wandering thoughts suggested.
</p>
<p>
Tellson's Bank had a run upon it in the mail. As the bank
passenger—with an arm drawn through the leathern strap, which did what
lay in it to keep him from pounding against the next passenger,
and driving him into his corner, whenever the coach got a special
jolt—nodded in his place, with half-shut eyes, the little
coach-windows, and the coach-lamp dimly gleaming through them, and the
bulky bundle of opposite passenger, became the bank, and did a great
stroke of business. The rattle of the harness was the chink of money,
and more drafts were honoured in five minutes than even Tellson's, with
all its foreign and home connection, ever paid in thrice the time. Then
the strong-rooms underground, at Tellson's, with such of their valuable
stores and secrets as were known to the passenger (and it was not a
little that he knew about them), opened before him, and he went in among
them with the great keys and the feebly-burning candle, and found them
safe, and strong, and sound, and still, just as he had last seen them.
</p>
<p>
But, though the bank was almost always with him, and though the coach
(in a confused way, like the presence of pain under an opiate) was
always with him, there was another current of impression that never
ceased to run, all through the night. He was on his way to dig some one
out of a grave.
</p>
<p>
Now, which of the multitude of faces that showed themselves before him
was the true face of the buried person, the shadows of the night did
not indicate; but they were all the faces of a man of five-and-forty by
years, and they differed principally in the passions they expressed,
and in the ghastliness of their worn and wasted state. Pride, contempt,
defiance, stubbornness, submission, lamentation, succeeded one another;
so did varieties of sunken cheek, cadaverous colour, emaciated hands
and figures. But the face was in the main one face, and every head was
prematurely white. A hundred times the dozing passenger inquired of this
spectre:
</p>
<p>
"Buried how long?"
</p>
<p>
The answer was always the same: "Almost eighteen years."
</p>
<p>
"You had abandoned all hope of being dug out?"
</p>
<p>
"Long ago."
</p>
<p>
"You know that you are recalled to life?"
</p>
<p>
"They tell me so."
</p>
<p>
"I hope you care to live?"
</p>
<p>
"I can't say."
</p>
<p>
"Shall I show her to you? Will you come and see her?"
</p>
<p>
The answers to this question were various and contradictory. Sometimes
the broken reply was, "Wait! It would kill me if I saw her too soon."
Sometimes, it was given in a tender rain of tears, and then it was,
"Take me to her." Sometimes it was staring and bewildered, and then it
was, "I don't know her. I don't understand."
</p>
<p>
After such imaginary discourse, the passenger in his fancy would dig,
and dig, dig—now with a spade, now with a great key, now with his
hands—to dig this wretched creature out. Got out at last, with earth
hanging about his face and hair, he would suddenly fan away to dust. The
passenger would then start to himself, and lower the window, to get the
reality of mist and rain on his cheek.
</p>
<p>
Yet even when his eyes were opened on the mist and rain, on the moving
patch of light from the lamps, and the hedge at the roadside retreating
by jerks, the night shadows outside the coach would fall into the train
of the night shadows within. The real Banking-house by Temple Bar, the
real business of the past day, the real strong rooms, the real express
sent after him, and the real message returned, would all be there. Out
of the midst of them, the ghostly face would rise, and he would accost
it again.
</p>
<p>
"Buried how long?"
</p>
<p>
"Almost eighteen years."
</p>
<p>
"I hope you care to live?"
</p>
<p>
"I can't say."
</p>
<p>
Dig—dig—dig—until an impatient movement from one of the two
passengers would admonish him to pull up the window, draw his arm
securely through the leathern strap, and speculate upon the two
slumbering forms, until his mind lost its hold of them, and they again
slid away into the bank and the grave.
</p>
<p>
"Buried how long?"
</p>
<p>
"Almost eighteen years."
</p>
<p>
"You had abandoned all hope of being dug out?"
</p>
<p>
"Long ago."
</p>
<p>
The words were still in his hearing as just spoken—distinctly in
his hearing as ever spoken words had been in his life—when the weary
passenger started to the consciousness of daylight, and found that the
shadows of the night were gone.
</p>
<p>
He lowered the window, and looked out at the rising sun. There was a
ridge of ploughed land, with a plough upon it where it had been left
last night when the horses were unyoked; beyond, a quiet coppice-wood,
in which many leaves of burning red and golden yellow still remained
upon the trees. Though the earth was cold and wet, the sky was clear,
and the sun rose bright, placid, and beautiful.
</p>
<p>
"Eighteen years!" said the passenger, looking at the sun. "Gracious
Creator of day! To be buried alive for eighteen years!"
</p>
</div>
<div>
<h2>4. The Preparation</h2>
<p>
When the mail got successfully to Dover, in the course of the forenoon,
the head drawer at the Royal George Hotel opened the coach-door as his
custom was. He did it with some flourish of ceremony, for a mail journey
from London in winter was an achievement to congratulate an adventurous
traveller upon.
</p>
<p>
By that time, there was only one adventurous traveller left be
congratulated: for the two others had been set down at their respective
roadside destinations. The mildewy inside of the coach, with its damp
and dirty straw, its disagreeable smell, and its obscurity, was rather
like a larger dog-kennel. Mr. Lorry, the passenger, shaking himself out
of it in chains of straw, a tangle of shaggy wrapper, flapping hat, and
muddy legs, was rather like a larger sort of dog.
</p>
<p>
"There will be a packet to Calais, tomorrow, drawer?"
</p>
<p>
"Yes, sir, if the weather holds and the wind sets tolerable fair. The
tide will serve pretty nicely at about two in the afternoon, sir. Bed,
sir?"
</p>
<p>
"I shall not go to bed till night; but I want a bedroom, and a barber."
</p>
<p>
"And then breakfast, sir? Yes, sir. That way, sir, if you please.
Show Concord! Gentleman's valise and hot water to Concord. Pull off
gentleman's boots in Concord. (You will find a fine sea-coal fire, sir.)
Fetch barber to Concord. Stir about there, now, for Concord!"
</p>
<p>
The Concord bed-chamber being always assigned to a passenger by the
mail, and passengers by the mail being always heavily wrapped up from
head to foot, the room had the odd interest for the establishment of the
Royal George, that although but one kind of man was seen to go into it,
all kinds and varieties of men came out of it. Consequently, another
drawer, and two porters, and several maids and the landlady, were all
loitering by accident at various points of the road between the Concord
and the coffee-room, when a gentleman of sixty, formally dressed in a
brown suit of clothes, pretty well worn, but very well kept, with large
square cuffs and large flaps to the pockets, passed along on his way to
his breakfast.
</p>
<p>
The coffee-room had no other occupant, that forenoon, than the gentleman
in brown. His breakfast-table was drawn before the fire, and as he sat,
with its light shining on him, waiting for the meal, he sat so still,
that he might have been sitting for his portrait.
</p>
<p>
Very orderly and methodical he looked, with a hand on each knee, and a
loud watch ticking a sonorous sermon under his flapped waist-coat,
as though it pitted its gravity and longevity against the levity and
evanescence of the brisk fire. He had a good leg, and was a little vain
of it, for his brown stockings fitted sleek and close, and were of a
fine texture; his shoes and buckles, too, though plain, were trim. He
wore an odd little sleek crisp flaxen wig, setting very close to his
head: which wig, it is to be presumed, was made of hair, but which
looked far more as though it were spun from filaments of silk or glass.
His linen, though not of a fineness in accordance with his stockings,
was as white as the tops of the waves that broke upon the neighbouring
beach, or the specks of sail that glinted in the sunlight far at sea. A
face habitually suppressed and quieted, was still lighted up under the
quaint wig by a pair of moist bright eyes that it must have cost
their owner, in years gone by, some pains to drill to the composed and
reserved expression of Tellson's Bank. He had a healthy colour in his
cheeks, and his face, though lined, bore few traces of anxiety.
But, perhaps the confidential bachelor clerks in Tellson's Bank were
principally occupied with the cares of other people; and perhaps
second-hand cares, like second-hand clothes, come easily off and on.
</p>
<p>
Completing his resemblance to a man who was sitting for his portrait,
Mr. Lorry dropped off to sleep. The arrival of his breakfast roused him,
and he said to the drawer, as he moved his chair to it:
</p>
<p>
"I wish accommodation prepared for a young lady who may come here at any
time to-day. She may ask for Mr. Jarvis Lorry, or she may only ask for a
gentleman from Tellson's Bank. Please to let me know."
</p>
<p>
"Yes, sir. Tellson's Bank in London, sir?"
</p>
<p>
"Yes."
</p>
<p>
"Yes, sir. We have oftentimes the honour to entertain your gentlemen in
their travelling backwards and forwards betwixt London and Paris, sir. A
vast deal of travelling, sir, in Tellson and Company's House."
</p>
<p>
"Yes. We are quite a French House, as well as an English one."
</p>
<p>
"Yes, sir. Not much in the habit of such travelling yourself, I think,
sir?"
</p>
<p>
"Not of late years. It is fifteen years since we—since I—came last
from France."
</p>
<p>
"Indeed, sir? That was before my time here, sir. Before our people's
time here, sir. The George was in other hands at that time, sir."
</p>
<p>
"I believe so."
</p>
<p>
"But I would hold a pretty wager, sir, that a House like Tellson and
Company was flourishing, a matter of fifty, not to speak of fifteen
years ago?"
</p>
<p>
"You might treble that, and say a hundred and fifty, yet not be far from
the truth."
</p>
<p>
"Indeed, sir!"
</p>
<p>
Rounding his mouth and both his eyes, as he stepped backward from the
table, the waiter shifted his napkin from his right arm to his left,
dropped into a comfortable attitude, and stood surveying the guest while
he ate and drank, as from an observatory or watchtower. According to the
immemorial usage of waiters in all ages.
</p>
<p>
When Mr. Lorry had finished his breakfast, he went out for a stroll on
the beach. The little narrow, crooked town of Dover hid itself away
from the beach, and ran its head into the chalk cliffs, like a marine
ostrich. The beach was a desert of heaps of sea and stones tumbling
wildly about, and the sea did what it liked, and what it liked was
destruction. It thundered at the town, and thundered at the cliffs, and
brought the coast down, madly. The air among the houses was of so strong
a piscatory flavour that one might have supposed sick fish went up to be
dipped in it, as sick people went down to be dipped in the sea. A little
fishing was done in the port, and a quantity of strolling about by
night, and looking seaward: particularly at those times when the tide
made, and was near flood. Small tradesmen, who did no business whatever,
sometimes unaccountably realised large fortunes, and it was remarkable
that nobody in the neighbourhood could endure a lamplighter.
</p>
<p>
As the day declined into the afternoon, and the air, which had been
at intervals clear enough to allow the French coast to be seen, became
again charged with mist and vapour, Mr. Lorry's thoughts seemed to cloud
too. When it was dark, and he sat before the coffee-room fire, awaiting
his dinner as he had awaited his breakfast, his mind was busily digging,
digging, digging, in the live red coals.
</p>
<p>
A bottle of good claret after dinner does a digger in the red coals no
harm, otherwise than as it has a tendency to throw him out of work.
Mr. Lorry had been idle a long time, and had just poured out his last
glassful of wine with as complete an appearance of satisfaction as is
ever to be found in an elderly gentleman of a fresh complexion who has
got to the end of a bottle, when a rattling of wheels came up the narrow
street, and rumbled into the inn-yard.
</p>
<p>
He set down his glass untouched. "This is Mam'selle!" said he.
</p>
<p>
In a very few minutes the waiter came in to announce that Miss Manette
had arrived from London, and would be happy to see the gentleman from
Tellson's.
</p>
<p>
"So soon?"
</p>
<p>
Miss Manette had taken some refreshment on the road, and required none
then, and was extremely anxious to see the gentleman from Tellson's
immediately, if it suited his pleasure and convenience.
</p>
<p>
The gentleman from Tellson's had nothing left for it but to empty his
glass with an air of stolid desperation, settle his odd little flaxen
wig at the ears, and follow the waiter to Miss Manette's apartment.
It was a large, dark room, furnished in a funereal manner with black
horsehair, and loaded with heavy dark tables. These had been oiled and
oiled, until the two tall candles on the table in the middle of the room
were gloomily reflected on every leaf; as if <i>they</i> were buried, in deep
graves of black mahogany, and no light to speak of could be expected
from them until they were dug out.
</p>
<p>
The obscurity was so difficult to penetrate that Mr. Lorry, picking his
way over the well-worn Turkey carpet, supposed Miss Manette to be, for
the moment, in some adjacent room, until, having got past the two tall
candles, he saw standing to receive him by the table between them and
the fire, a young lady of not more than seventeen, in a riding-cloak,
and still holding her straw travelling-hat by its ribbon in her hand. As
his eyes rested on a short, slight, pretty figure, a quantity of golden
hair, a pair of blue eyes that met his own with an inquiring look, and
a forehead with a singular capacity (remembering how young and smooth
it was), of rifting and knitting itself into an expression that was
not quite one of perplexity, or wonder, or alarm, or merely of a bright
fixed attention, though it included all the four expressions—as his
eyes rested on these things, a sudden vivid likeness passed before him,
of a child whom he had held in his arms on the passage across that very
Channel, one cold time, when the hail drifted heavily and the sea ran
high. The likeness passed away, like a breath along the surface of
the gaunt pier-glass behind her, on the frame of which, a hospital
procession of negro cupids, several headless and all cripples, were
offering black baskets of Dead Sea fruit to black divinities of the
feminine gender—and he made his formal bow to Miss Manette.
</p>
<p>
"Pray take a seat, sir." In a very clear and pleasant young voice; a
little foreign in its accent, but a very little indeed.
</p>
<p>
"I kiss your hand, miss," said Mr. Lorry, with the manners of an earlier
date, as he made his formal bow again, and took his seat.
</p>
<p>
"I received a letter from the Bank, sir, yesterday, informing me that
some intelligence—or discovery—"
</p>
<p>
"The word is not material, miss; either word will do."
</p>
<p>
"—respecting the small property of my poor father, whom I never saw—so
long dead—"
</p>
<p>
Mr. Lorry moved in his chair, and cast a troubled look towards the
hospital procession of negro cupids. As if <i>they</i> had any help for
anybody in their absurd baskets!
</p>
<p>
"—rendered it necessary that I should go to Paris, there to communicate
with a gentleman of the Bank, so good as to be despatched to Paris for
the purpose."
</p>
<p>
"Myself."
</p>
<p>
"As I was prepared to hear, sir."
</p>
<p>
She curtseyed to him (young ladies made curtseys in those days), with a
pretty desire to convey to him that she felt how much older and wiser he
was than she. He made her another bow.
</p>
<p>
"I replied to the Bank, sir, that as it was considered necessary, by
those who know, and who are so kind as to advise me, that I should go to
France, and that as I am an orphan and have no friend who could go with
me, I should esteem it highly if I might be permitted to place myself,
during the journey, under that worthy gentleman's protection. The
gentleman had left London, but I think a messenger was sent after him to
beg the favour of his waiting for me here."
</p>
<p>
"I was happy," said Mr. Lorry, "to be entrusted with the charge. I shall
be more happy to execute it."
</p>
<p>
"Sir, I thank you indeed. I thank you very gratefully. It was told me
by the Bank that the gentleman would explain to me the details of the
business, and that I must prepare myself to find them of a surprising
nature. I have done my best to prepare myself, and I naturally have a
strong and eager interest to know what they are."
</p>
<p>
"Naturally," said Mr. Lorry. "Yes—I—"
</p>
<p>
After a pause, he added, again settling the crisp flaxen wig at the
ears, "It is very difficult to begin."
</p>
<p>... read the rest on <a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/98">Project Gutenberg</a></p>
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